Single Source is a solution to a common documentation problem: creating paper, Windows help and HTML documentation from a single document source. It is especially suited to the user documentation for an application. Many tools exist that would appear to do the job, but unlike Single Source they tend to be limited in the automatic creation of the following:
- "What’s This?" help, obtained from low-level sections that have a particular heading style.
- MAP file, allowing you to link a Help file to the application it documents.
- Help Contents file, derived from the Table of Contents in the source document.
- Related Topics list for each topic, derived from the primary keywords in the index terms for the topic. When reading a topic in the Help file, you can click a button to display a list of topics that are related to it.
- Hypertext links, derived from cross-references (for both Help and HTML).

Single Source requires the Microsoft Help Compiler, which you can download from the internet, and Microsoft Word.